no one has ever loved you
by i set my sims on fire
Summary: She doesn't care if she falls - James/Dominique. Rated T for language and mature themes. Cousincest.


**I have no idea what this is. I wrote it in the middle of the night in a strange mood, so don't expect anything remotely sane.**

**Warning: mature themes, mentions of suicide and character death and strong language.**

_no one has ever loved you_

And she stares into the overcast sky, knowing she has no control, no control, no control. He's already gone. And his eyes, russet brown and flecked with gold, they'll never look again. Not at her, not at anything, he's gone. Away from her.

The branch she's sat on, so high up, so high up; it creaks, and for a moment, she thinks about falling. She imagines herself losing grip and falling, her body twisting and convulsing momentarily in mid air before crashing against the floor so hard, too hard, and then she can't move, and her head is twisting in the wrong direction. Her neck bent back, and her leg sticking out. Her hair covering glassy dead eyes. The branch creaks, but the wood does not crack, and she does not fall. She finds herself gripping the wood tighter, tighter, the bark digs into her hands. Patterns are indented into her skin.

And then she realises; her hands only coil around the branch out of habit, out of expectation. She doesn't care if she falls.

And then, she is falling, falling, falling.

/

When they are kids, they make a pact to be friends forever, and of course it doesn't last. Because one minute, they're on the Hogwarts Express, and she's holding the edge of her seat and she's nervous because outside the safety of their carriage, what feels like a thousand other students rush past, their faces a blur of skin, their clothes fuzzing into one technicolor collage, and the brightness hurts her eyes. And they are laughing together. Everything is okay, everything is okay. He is talking about Quidditch teams and DaDa classes and things his father did, and the Fat Lady and house elves; moving staircases and talking portraits and he's overusing the word 'awesome'. She's nodding and smiling and staring out of the window and chewing on her lip, and for once he doesn't pick up on her fear, and that's a good thing, a good thing, a good thing. And then, they are jam-packed into little boats and she feels dizzy whilst they float across a murky water, and the sky above them glistens, illuminating the lake and the big big castle with stars scattered around a full moon. It makes her think of her father. She feels kind of ill. He doesn't stop talking. They're rushed into the Great Hall, there are so many faces, she feels like she is drowning. The scatter of voices combined with the bright glow of gold and red, green and silver, honey yellow and deep blue, eyes boring into her back, it's too much, too much, and her head spins. He is engrossed in a conversation with a boy with blue eyes and dark hair, his laughter fills her aching ears. And then someone clears their throat loudly, and laughter and an ocean of voices turns into hushed whispers and murmurs, and the shouting stops. She still feels dizzy.

They stand in a line, and it's the same line, but she feels miles away; too far, too far. And a high crisp voice calls out name after name after name. She flies away. And then; 'James Potter', and he's on his feet, and he's walking away from her, and a strange-looking hat barely skims the top of his head before GRYFFINDOR, and the applause is louder than any so far. He grins, at the Gryffindor table, at his new friend, but mostly at her. And she tries for smile. The corners of her mouth raise. Her lips curl. But her eyes remain dull and her palms sweat, and her heart is beating underneath her cloak, so fast, too fast. And she is scared, kind of, maybe, because she isn't brave and that's not okay. He doesn't notice. And then he's gone, too, lost in the sea of faces and the disfigured rainbow of the room, and she is alone. It is a lifetime, almost, until 'Dominique Weasley', is called, and she approaches the stool slowly, awkwardly, and a hat is placed on silvery blonde hair. And it talks to her, murmuring who she is and how she feels and where she belongs, and she feels awkward, open, wrong, because how can a hat know her better than her best friend? And then, hours, days, weeks later, 'SLYTHERIN', and there is a silence until a weak applause from the Slytherin table. The cheering dies before it begins. He doesn't look at her for the rest of the ceremony. Her head still hurts.

/

The hospital room is white. In fact, everything is, a white ceiling, a white floor, and a stiff white mattress pulled up to her chin. Her face is white, even. She looks like death. A machine bleeps. Lines blur together, bright colours, bright colours.

'Christ, Dominique,' a voice. It's not his voice. This voice doesn't matter. 'What were you thinking? Are you trying to break your neck? Kill yourself? You're lucky to be alive...'

She closes her eyes, and allows her sister to shout, rant, bitch her

head off. He isn't here, so she doesn't care. She doesn't, she doesn't.

It's not long until she hears the anger in her sister's voice die down, and then she just hears raw emotion; sadness, guilt, desperation. She knows then that her sister blames herself for this, that her whole family must have dubbed this a suicide attempt after what happened. After what happened to her, to him, to them. She wants to open her eyes, except she doesn't want to see glistening tears and spiderwebs of smudged mascara staining her sister's cheeks, she doesn't want to see deep purple rings underlining red-rimmed eyes, and she doesn't want messy blonde hair. She wants to explain that this wasn't a suicide attempt, and if she was going to kill herself, she'd find a better way than falling of a loose tree branch. Her head hurts. She wants to sleep. Her mouth doesn't open.

/

He doesn't talk to her for a week after the sorting. He looks at her with big eyes in classes, scanning her face as if she's somehow become someone else. She hasn't. She's the same. It's him that's changed. She sits alone at the Slytherin table. The girls in her dorm are friendly at first sight, but their smiles soon turn awkward and the room begins to turn quiet whenever she enters, and she knows that they don't like her, she knows. And she does care, a little bit, maybe, just not a lot. He has friends. Everyone follows him around, laughing at his jokes, talking in his ear, girls flick their hair, batter their eyelashes, he barely even notices but then he's always been kind of ignorant, she thinks.

A week after the sorting, he talks to her. They cross paths in the hall. It is more than a little awkward. He says, 'hi', and so does she. She doesn't meet his eyes. He asks, 'how are classes?' and dryly, she responds with, 'you're in most of them', and he glares at her.

And then, 'this is all your fault, you know.'

'How is it?'

'You got sorted into Slytherin, Dominique, you're bad-'

'Shut up, Potter,' she sneers. 'You're an idiot.'

She storms away, tears don't fall, and he stands still in the same place. He doesn't say anything until some Gryffindor girl who occasionally acts as his shadow approaches and asks what's wrong, and then he is all 'I'm good', and smiling.

They don't speak again until Christmas. He apologises, his eyes fixed to the floor, she nods curtly. They begin sitting together in Potions, but they don't really fix their fragmented friendship until third year, when he chases off some girls calling her names and she sniffs like she's indifferent but he catches her smiling when she thinks he's not looking, and, yeah.

/

When she's discharged from hospital, despite her protests ('It was an accident! It was an accident! It was an accident!') she is more or less placed on suicide watch. And she doesn't go back to her flat, she's forced back to her parents' house to 'have a rest', and her brother and sister take it in turns to pretend to want to have something to do with her, rather than admit they're only making awkward small talk and bad jokes and making empty offers of things they could but won't do so that she won't slit her wrist in the bathtub. It makes her feel funny. She sits in her room, pretending to be asleep when anyone knocks on the door because she knows it's not him. If it was him, he's use their special knocking pattern and she'd know and she'd grin- or, he wouldn't knock at all. She hates it when he just enters her room without warning; when anyone does, but right now it's all she wants for him to burst in through the door, his hair a mess and his eyes glowing bright. It's all she wants, all she wants, all she wants. She watches the door. The handle doesn't move. There is nobody there until her brother comes to check on her. She hates him because, he's not the boy she wants to see, his hair is blonde, not dark, his eyes are blue, not brown, and he is her brother, not her best friend and her cousin and Merlin knows what else-

That day, at dinner, she doesn't say a thing.

/

She has loved him for a long time. It makes her squirm, because it's wrong, and she maybe she cares a little bit, but not enough to keep her gaze from burning into his back in classes they share, not enough to stop her eyes lingering on his lips when he talks, not enough, not enough, not enough. But in her sixth year, it changes, and they're sat behind the burrow hidden by some trees haphazardly scattered around them when he kisses her for the first time. It's a mistake; he's teasing her, and his teasing always becomes flirting, somehow, and so her heart races and her cheeks redden and she hopes he doesn't notice, and then

somehow she's looking up and he's glancing down, and their heads tilt and their lips meet and then they're kissing as if nothing else matters, let alone the same blood running through both of their veins.

'We should stop,' he says, but there's a smirk playing on his lips and he kisses her neck, and-

They don't.

/

She stays indoors for three weeks straight. And then she tells her mother she's going out, and Fleur tells her no later than eleven, please, and she wonders why they are treating her like she's fourteen again and not nineteen. She could go home, if she wanted to, but she doesn't because home is piles of dirty clothes and dirty dishes and old Quidditch sweatshirts that smell like him, and the bathroom smells like aftershave and the bedroom smells like cigarettes. She apparates to somewhere, anywhere, and anywhere turns into the woods where they first kissed and where she fell, the woodland near the Burrow. She considers, momentarily, dropping in to say hi to Nana Molly and Granddad Arthur. She supposes she should feel guilty. She must have given them a terrible scare; first going missing, and then when they found her hours later, her boy twisted and half-buried underneath fallen leaves and twigs, they thought she was dead, dead like him, but she wasn't, she was breathing, slowly, but breathing all the same, and her skin was deathly pale, her lips almost blue, her heart beating dangerously slow. She's still alive, he isn't, something's wrong here. Something's wrong, it's wrong, it's wrong. The twigs snap underneath her feet, the leaves crunch, birds whistle in a distance. Her head hurts. She finds a tree. The tree. The one with shaky branches and green and black bugs that slither up the fragmented bark. She feels her hands grip the branch, she feels her feet dangling into thin air. She looks up at the tree, and sees how it shoots up into the air, so high, too high, and the way she clawed her way up there last time looking to get away, get away. She looks and she stares and she figures that it's pretty weird she's alive, that could've killed her, should've killed her, that fall onto greengold forest floor. But she's alive, he's not, she is. Her fingers find her neck. She strokes the pale skin, imagines it twisted the other way, the bones jittered, broken. Imagines her body littered on the floor, dead like the skeletons of leaves. It does not scare her.

Her family have been tiptoeing around her lately. They are scared to leave her alone, the guilt of finding her body in a bloodbath, or limp from swallowing too many pills, the guilt of her body found floating under a bridge, it would haunt them for the rest of their lives, they couldn't take it, can't take it. That's why they watch her, she reckons. They are scared to leave her alone, but do not particularly want to be in her company, either. She thinks about climbing the tree, scaling the bark and overgrowth and balancing delicately on the branches. It doesn't matter if she falls, doesn't matter if she winds up in a stiff white room with tubes sticking in and out of her skin, it doesn't even matter if she lands with her neck crooked sideways, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter.

She doesn't climb, in the end. She walks home. It's still light outside. She goes straight to bed, even though sleep doesn't come until the early hours of the morning when the house is empty and the sky is dark. Sleep comes then, when the clock says it's 3am, and nightmares follow. She sees his face.

/

His lips replace those of countless strangers. His hands brush her skin and his fingers fit with hers, and it's okay, she's okay, she's happy. Happiness never came in the form of boys with big smiles and wondering hands and lips full of lies. Happiness comes from him, even when it means sneaking into broom closets or a stolen kiss behind the Burrow, and she wonders why it's wrong when he makes her so happy.

They graduate Hogwarts. He lives with his parents' in the basement, her father buys her a flat and he spends his 'working hours' tangled in her sheets with lipstick stains on his right cheek, and his lips find her neck again, again, again, and then they smoke cigarettes on the balcony and he makes her smile. And then, it's all over, he falls, one day.

He falls, like she did, but not. Because he wasn't scaling trees in the forest that fed their childhoods; he was on his broom in the rain, in the wind, and he fell, through the skies and through the storms and he hit his head and his neck twisted the wrong way and no, please no, he's dead in a second, his body contorted and his bones broken. His body is broken and there is no spell to breathe life into a dead vessel. She stays up all night, crying, and then she's fucked and she drinks for days and winds up in a gutter and she misses the funeral. And he's gone.

/

She falls, one day.

But she is not hanging from loose branches, she doesn't slip, doesn't crash, it's not an accident, never an accident. They find her hanging in her bedroom. The rope is tight. She's gone. She's gone. She's gone.

The funeral is a sea of bodies dressed in black. Everyone attends, except James Potter.

Because James Potter is dead.


End file.
